An Example of Real World Plagiarism
A computer.

Stephen Glass

As a journalist for the respected news magazine The New Republic, Stephen Glass wrote 41 articles between 1995 and 1998. 9 It was later revealed that 27 of these articles were partial or complete works of fiction.10 In order to write entertaining and relevant articles about current events, Glass went to great lengths to create notes for meetings that never happened, make up quotes, "forge...faxes on fake letterheads of phony organizations...even voice mail or actual calls from people pretending to be sources." 11 Glass even created a fake Web site to support one of his stories in order to fool the magazine's fact checkers.12

Glass was found out when a journalist for Forbes Digital Tool, an online news source, started to investigate one of Glass' stories. The story, "Hack Heaven," was about a young hacker who was hired by that company to help improve their online security after he had vandalized the company's Web site. When Adam Penenberg started to dig deeper into Glass' article, he found that he could not verify any of the information. To all appearances, neither the hacker nor the company ever existed.13

When Penenberg broke the news, a month-long investigation was launched. "The inquiry found that Mr. Glass had completely fabricated six articles and had manufactured material in parts of 21 other articles." 14